Ode to Sheep

You may or may not have seen the newest Spin-Off magazine already, and seeing it you may or may not have bought it. Perhaps you looked on the cover and said 'What the hell, sheep puppets? I don't need no stinkin' sheep puppets.'

Why, I bet you didn't even look inside, did you?

If you had, you would have seen that the Sheepies are at least twenty times cuter on the inside (and in person!) than they appear on the cover. Plus, fun colorwork! Even if (like me) you'd never done stranded colorwork before! And if it looks a little like a dyspeptic llama (what with the not doing stranded colorwork before), who cares? It's a puppet! It can as easily be a dyspeptic llama puppet as a sheepie.

So far it's been three days since I cast on for Pilvie (the grey and brown one on the cover) and he's done except for the face. Not 'done except for embroidering on features', but 'the knitting of the face is all that's left'. Ergo, he runs around all faceless, asking people if he can have their faces. So far, no takers. Ergo, I'll have to find him one myself :)

Gratuitous Cat Photos

It Is Done!

And it is GLORIOUS.


Which is to say, rather, that it will be glorious, once it's done. It has potential gloriousness? And knitting converts it into kinetic gloriosity? But then, you could knit from it multiple times - an infinite amount of times, if you wanted. Does that mean it has infinite potential glory?

See, this is the kind of shit that keeps me up at night.

Regardless, click for the full image if you like. The blue squares are stitches that will be done a la short-row, and the yellow is the border of plain knit stitches (actually garter, now that I think about it) to give the turning some extra stability. Obviously, this is the first time I've done something like this, but I'm feeling pretty hopefull. What do you think?

Have I Mentioned...

the super-awesome treat I'm getting for myself when I finish this top? It's yellow. It's gloriously, gloriously yellow.

Good Times

Well, the vacation has come and gone, and it was wonderful. Sweetie and I had a great time, his little cousins that went with us are awesome, and of course I love the rest of his family. We rode many a ride, got stuck on a few (one for half an hour, we had to walk down - I shit you not - 14 flights of stairs to get down), and all in all it was about as perfect a vacation as you could wish.

During much of the car trip (it's a good 13 hour drive either way) I had intended to work on my newest project - see, the owner of our LYS wants me to knit her a small top, and is paying me in twice the top's amount of yarn, a lovely 10 balls of SWTC's Pure, 100% soysilk - like I'm going to pass that up? Anyway, I had planned to get at least a quarter done on the drive, packed the yarn and needles and gague swatch, and what did I forget? The pattern, obviously XD It's coming along well now that I'm home, I only have to do an inch and a half a day to finish on time. It'll go faster, of course, once this 6.5" of 3x3 rib with absolutely pointless tiny bobbles are done.

God I hate bobbles. There is no point at which the phrase "Hey, you know what'd look good here? Bobbles!" is anything but drunk talk. They're like the vestigal tails of the knitting beast.

Anyway, schematic to come, since I like doing them, and folks like seeing 'em :) And now, back to work!

Library, Meet the Knitter

So, I got this library job, see. It's pretty awesome, the people are nice and the work all makes sense. There's a lot of paperwork, but it's all based on the same stuff, so that's not bad. It's in the department that buys the books, so of course my first thought is knitting.

We have some knitting books already, but for the most part our collection sucks. If you're wanting to learn how to knit, how to design patterns, or want to have anything to do with lace at all, you're basically screwed. So I went up to my department head today, and pitched an idea: What if I get a list of books and other good material on knitting, that basically follows the whole learning curve, contains no (overly) superfluous volumes, is jam-packed of awesome-resource type books for when you're at the top of your game, and then the library buys the things on the list?

Wonder of wonders, she said yes! So now the A&M library is going to be chock-full of knitterly (and spinnerly!) goodness, from the classics to modern stuff, and folk'll come the state over to admire it :D

Or at least, that's my dream. the list begins.

What's this? MORE math?

So I've done some more fancy fenangling (by which I mean basic math), and come to some conclusions. I am on ball 7, and finishing the third repeat of chart B in Frost Flowers. Doing the pattern as written, the end of this chart would have had me at 30.6% of finished. This would be fine were it an even 1/3 of the way, but that 3% got me nervous. One third of 22 balls? Seven and one third. That's finishing with room to spare. 30% of 22 balls? Six and two thirds. So as you can see, I'd need to get at least 7 balls out of 30% to be comfy here. Ergo, I could either order more yarn with no hope of getting the same dyelot (seriously, NO hope), or I could eliminate a repeat of the chart. I have opted for the second, which will give me a 5-foot shawl instead of a 5-foot-6-inch shawl, but will leave me with my sanity intact, and is still more shawl than I'm likely to need in Texas.

This, of course, needs a new graphic:


Glorious, is it not? So now, instead of being almost 30% of the way finished, I'm almost 35%! Yay Frost Flowers! Yay me!

Beware the Ides of... June.

Yes, I know, technically the ides of June was yesterday. Nevermind that. The first wedding Sweetie and I were invited to last weekend went very well (nobody ran away screaming, which is always a good sign); they had a big Catholic wedding and a big nerdy reception, both of which were intriguing and awesome. Sweetie caught the garter (again), though I missed the bouquet, so I've got to try again at the wedding we're invited to this NEXT weekend. To summarize, work goes well, I'm eating better, I cut 16 inches from my hair (it's to my collarbone now, if that gives you any perspective) and the Jayne hat is sitting atop my bookshelf with half an earflap. In the meantime, LACE!

I have once again gotten Sharon Miller's Heirloom Lace on interlibrary loan. I don't know what kind of crazy-juice my brain was making the first time I ordered it, that I only flipped through in passing and dismissed it as 'not worth the $50'. I was wrong. So incredibly, incredibly wrong. As soon as budget allows, Heirloom Lace and the Alden Amos Big Book of Handspinning are both coming home with me. They're just such fantastic resources!

For example, I have decided that the Midnight Fleece Artist mohair is just too pretty for something as easy to knit as Claptois. This may, in retrospect, be a mistake, but hey - it's my knitting, and the thought of getting row upon row of mohair to actually drop didn't seem as easy and fun as it once had. So I had it suggested I write some lace for it - maybe use that giant Miller book I had on hand for once. So I did. And it's awesome.

What I'm doing started out as simple Print o' the Wave, but then I wanted an edging. Use the PotW edging to match? Too easy. Pick an edging with the same row count as my main body design? Too sensible. Pick an edging that's knit on later, neccessitating picking up a million stitches in mohair? Too insane. So in the end, it's Print 'o the Wave, with the full Wedding Veil edging, which is to say a border and an edging, where the border is two rows taller than both the edging and the main body pattern, so that you need to do seven repeats on the outside and center, and six in the middle. Sounds like a fun thing to cast on unprepared using mohair, right? So I'm test-knitting it in some Knitpicks, the paint your own laceweight, and it's a lot of fun. I don't really know how corners are supposed to be addressed - I emailed Eunny about it for Unravelling, can't wait to hear back, so of course I charted away and now have to figure out how to actually work this chart. I'm thinking short-rows?

Anyway, provided any of this works out at all, I will of course provide photos and the pattern. Hell, I may even submit it to Knitty or Magknits - I'd have a better chance on Magknits, I think, since they update more often, but Knitty seems to have better patterns, so I hope I can get in there. It would be a hoot to get the Sul Ross statue to model for me in the pictures - wouldn't he look fetching in a nice lace stole?

And We're Back!

Well, that was fun, wasn't it? We're all moved in to the new place, though not unpacked by a long shot (all of my clothes are still in laundry baskets. They're usually in laundry baskets, but my yarn is in a similar condition, so you see the gravity of the situation). Gaming has been only slightly interrupted, knitting moreso. A wave of pure sanity hit me yesterday, and I broke down and bought a stole for the weddings, instead of trying to knit 12 square feet in six days. The Fleece Artist mohair/nylon blend in lovely, lovely Midnight is currently sitting on my desk, eagerly awaiting her first stitches into a new life. I'm thinking Claptois - it's dressy enough for her color and composition, simple enough in look that the mohair halo will be a plus, not something hiding all kinds of fancy stitchwork, but intriguiging enough in construction that I don't think I'll get terribly bored. Frost Flowers, sadly, is still on semi-hold while I await the longer needles. It hurts me to not work on my baby. I picked her up today and I couldn't tell where I was from the stitch markers, I had to go and actually check the pattern! Of course, once I (stupidly) realised I was in mid-leaf, everything clicked and I pumped out another few rows. Nothing worth updating the schematics for, but I was happy. I'll take her to work tomorrow.

On a side note, I've thought of a few ideas for hats lately. One is a hat with cables, only instead of a purl background, separate them by exactly one yarn over. They'll float up your head! Obviously, gague will be important. Another idea is that since I seem to have trouble making hats that are exactly as deep as they should be (most are too shallow or swallow your head), putting in a band of garter stitch about mid-hat. It's got a great deal of vertical squish, so you could pull it as shallow or deep as you need it to be for that day. Sounds interesting, eh? eh?

Also, I have started (and mostly finished) a Jayne hat. All that is left is earflaps and the pom-pom. Sweetie looks remarkably cute in it.

Moving!

Whee, moving week is upon us! The computer is being disconnected this afternoon, so don't expect to hear from me until at least thursday (Sorry Nitty!). My yarn and fiber stash is now lovingly encased in three very large boxes, and three giant trashbags when we ran out of boxes. The roomie called Utilities and told them to shut off the power, just a day earlier than Sweetie and I had expected, so for us, we have to be done with all cleaning and vacuuming and taking of showers tomorrow evening at the latest - fun!

Of course I'm really excited, though. I get a whole new place to cover with my stuff, and fewer people's stuff to compete with :) Bookshelves in the living room! Spinning wheel next to the couch! Litter box not in my closet! It's going to be a good week.

In pre-wedding news, I finally have a dress, and shoes to be borrowed from my sister to go with it. Still need to run it by the bride, but the only dress that fit and wasn't $300 was both black AND white, so I've got to see if that's going to be okay. Sadly, it won't go with Frost Flowers at all, so I've got 10 days after the move to get Claptois knitted up out of some Fiber Artist kid mohair in Midnight that I picked up at Yarntopia (which IS as good as it sounds!)